From one plastic bag to one trillion: How did we get here?

Scott Rowland holds a paper grocery bag outside of Rowland's Independent Grocer, which he co-owns with his wife Kathy Heywood, in Port Elgin, in a photograph taken in June. After a post on the store's Facebook page drew hundreds of comments, the couple are trying to phase out plastic bags and replace them with a paper alternative. Patrick Spencer/Postmedia Network

The estimate is that humans use up to one trillion single-use plastic bags per year or roughly 140 plastic bags per person per year. Many of these take between 500 and 1,000 years to decompose and are harmful to our ecosystems. Most of us now realize that the plastic bag has many negative consequences, but it is interesting to reflect on how we got to this point.

The plastic bag was invented and patented in Sweden in 1965. A Swedish engineer, Sten Gustaf Thulin, developed a way of cutting and sealing a tube of plastic film and inserting handles. Within 15 years, 80 per cent of European supermarkets were offering plastic bags to their customers at the checkout. They were popular because they were lightweight, durable and didn’t leak. They also had handles and could be used multiple times.

The popularity of the plastic bag lagged in North America, introduced in 1979. But an intensive advertising and marketing campaign by Mobil, a company that produced the petrochemicals that made the bags, changed that. By the mid-1980s, the plastic bag replaced the paper bag at check-outs across the United States.

The proponents of the paper bag argued that your groceries stayed upright in the trunk of your car in paper bags. But the switch to plastic bags was inevitable – the bags were cheaper to produce and ship than paper bags. The paper industry was also shifting its production from kraft paper, used to make paper bags, to high quality bleached paper that could be used in office machines.

The re-use of the plastic bag was always touted as one of its benefits. The now defunct Plastic Grocery Sack Council, established in the U.S. in 1986, listed 17 ways to re-use a plastic bag. Suggestions included a bag to carry your knitting, a windbreak or even a makeshift raincoat in an emergency. Most plastic bags are re-used multiple times, most often for garbage container liners or bagging pet waste.

Of course, the paper bag industry also touted the re-usability of its product, such as wrapping parcels for shipping or covering school text books, but the number of ways a plastic bag could be re-used far outstripped the paper bag.

The environmental concerns about the plastic bag were raised shortly after they became popular. The primary concerns were that the material from which the bag was made, polyethylene, did not degrade and that it gave off to toxic fumes when burned. Even as the plastic breaks down into smaller pieces, these can leach toxins into the soil. Evidence that birds ingested the plastic bags or became entangled in them was already surfacing in the early 1980s.

Environmental concerns continued to mount. In 1997, the Great Pacific Garbage patch was discovered by sailor and researcher Charles Moore. Sea turtles were found to ingest the bags because they mistook them for jellyfish. Whales were found with pounds of plastic bags in their stomachs. Plastic bags were also becoming a garbage nightmare, especially in countries that did not have adequate waste disposal systems. They were responsible for clogging drains, which led to flooding.

For many of us, the solution was to recycle the bags. After multiple uses, the bag would be put into the recycling and find a new life in another form. However, plastic bags are some of the more difficult items to recycle. Because there are so many types and varieties of plastic bags, from garbage liners to dry cleaning bags, recycling companies often can’t manage their volume and scope. One solution was to export our bags to countries that could sort the items and recycle them. This option has evaporated over the last few years as fewer countries are willing to absorb the volume of recycling. In December 2018, China imposed limits on the kind of plastics that it would accept. The result is a 96 per cent drop in plastic recyclables being exported to China.

The export of our plastic recycling, including plastic bags, has meant that Canadian companies did not invest in the technology to recycle plastic bags. Some Canadian recyclers are now resorting to burning the plastics or sending them to landfill sites because they cannot economically deal with the volume.

Bio-degradable bags and bioplastics have recently entered the market as an alternative to the polyethylene bag. But even these products pose a problem, because the infrastructure to recycle them has not yet fully developed. If we personally try to compost a biodegradable bag, the home compost heap will likely not reach the required temperature to disintegrate the bag. Much more investment is needed in this area before we can replace one type of plastic bag with another.

Some countries have banned or taxed single-use plastic bags. The first to do so was Bangladesh, which banned single-use plastic bags in 2002 after it was discovered that the bags clogged drains and led to flooding. As of 2018, two dozen countries had sought to reduce plastic bag usage either through fees or bans. The Government of Canada is considering a ban on single-use plastics by 2021.

From a product that was touted as convenient, leak-proof, lightweight, reusable and easy to carry, to a major environmental problem. So, what now? How do we act to address this problem?

There are many solutions. Most of us already use totes or durable bags to carry our merchandise. Rather than using the plastic bags for fresh produce, we can bring our own cloth or paper bags to the grocery stores or markets. Lobbying grocery stores to carry more items that can be refilled, rather than being already pre-packaged is another solution. We can support the government initiative to ban single-use plastics.

Continuing to educate ourselves about the impact of our actions and lobbying for technologies and options that are less harmful to the planet is also part of the solution. Refusing to buy things that are packaged in plastic is another option, and one that will directly affect a company’s profit margin if enough of us do this. Companies will respond to a change in consumer behaviour.

Most of us want to do the right thing. As we learn more about the impact of our actions on the planet and its flora and fauna, we can adjust so that we tread with a lighter step. There is a tendency for doom and gloom in this debate. And yet, we are now at a unique point where we can make a change that increases the health of our planet. Pretty exciting.